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Russell Collins » Russell Collins: Magic, Shopping and Mind Control

Russell Collins: Magic, Shopping and Mind Control

By Russell Collins | Published on 08.12.2009

I’m in the middle of buying a fish tank, and I need your advice.

I don’t know anything about fish tanks, but I have to make the decision quickly because I’ve got a bunch of tropical fish in a baggie that we just won at a fundraiser with a high bid of $122.

Russell Collins

We have free space on a bookshelf that narrows the choices — anything bigger than 10 inches by 14 inches would be too big; anything much smaller than that wouldn’t be able to hold all of the fish. We want one made of glass — they’re so much prettier than the acrylic plastic. Of course, they cost a little more.

At the store, Frank, the owner, arranged three tanks on the counter. They looked a lot alike, but I could see the difference from the printed tag taped to the side of each one. On the right was the ValueBowl at $99, with a 12-volt power filter, all accessories included and 1/4-inch glass. The middle one, the Elite, was $125, marked down “today only” from $165. It had a 12-volt power filter by Bosch Electronics and 3/8-inch glass. At the far end was the SuperElite at $225, also with 3/8-inch glass but a 24-volt Bosch power filter and a water softener.

Placing his hand on the middle bowl, Frank blew a cloud of smoke from his cigar. “The tank companies, they push the water conditioner,” he confided, leaning toward me. “I don’t want to steer you away from that SuperElite, God knows. But I’ve never used a water softener myself in 19 years in the business and, honestly, the fish don’t look unhappy. Some folks like that 24-volt filter, though.”

Assuming you don’t know much more about fish tanks than I do, which one do you think I should choose?

OK, I’m not really buying a fish tank. I’m conducting a little cognitive experiment to see if I can guide you into thinking a certain way about the value proposition I’m offering. Included in my experiment are a couple of ideas from cognitive research, magic and neuroscience that marketers and other persuaders are using to manipulate behavior.

Magic and neuroscience?

Psychologists have long been interested in visual illusions, because they tell us a lot about how we see the world. Most of us naturally assume that it works like this: Our eyes — like cameras — deliver a streaming image of reality to our brain, which processes the information for immediate use or stores it in memory.

But cognitive science reveals another reality — and neuroscience is confirming it. And it’s exactly what the magicians have been telling us forever. Reality is not quite what our eyes and brains are telling us, it turns out. Because the brain’s first job is to keep us alive, human perception has evolved for a fairly narrow range of activities. Find food. Evade predators. Fight off competitors. Reproduce. That’s pretty much it. Tracking every activity in the environment would severely undermine those goals, so the brain filters out the nonsurvival data through focus and attention.

Long before neuroscientists observed this feature of consciousness, marketers and magicians were exploiting it to astound, amaze or influence their customers by manipulating their perceptions and their choices.

Recently, Teller, of Penn & Teller fame, got together with a group of cognitive scientists and co-authored an academic article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. In it, the authors attempt to identify the major techniques of professional magicians, and translate them into the language of cognition.

One of the classic secrets of magic, as pretty much every school child knows, is misdirection: get you to look at my right hand while my left hand does the trick. Teller and the scientists identified two cognitive glitches that make that possible: change blindness and inattentional blindness.

Change blindness occurs when changes — even dramatic ones — occur in the visual field without our knowledge. Psychologist Richard Wiseman has produced a brilliant (and funny) example of change blindness using a color-changing card trick that you can see on YouTube. Like many card tricks, this one is achieved through changes that occur during micro-seconds of distraction, or by using hand movements that occur in plain sight but are untrackable with our normal visual mechanisms.

Inattentional blindness has been experimentally demonstrated with equally entertaining results. Daniel Simons and his colleagues at the Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois created a video of athletes passing a basketball. Asked to watch the video and count the number of times a ball is passed, a group of Simons’ students failed to notice a gorilla stride into the frame on the right, pause in the middle of the group to beat its chest and exit on the left.

When Simons pointed out the gorilla on a second viewing of the video, many of his students questioned whether the video had been switched. As Teller put it in a Wired interview earlier this year: “Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn’t mean it is simple.”

Like magicians, marketers are interested in swaying people’s perceptions. Unlike magicians, however, brand managers have been turning to science for many years to help them understand the mechanics of persuasion.

John Watson, one of the founders of behavioral psychology, went to work for ad agency J. Walter Thompson in the 1920s, and began the trend toward scientific marketing. Today, ad agencies are beginning to experiment with the most advanced brain-imaging techniques of neuroscience to get a glimpse of the workings of consumers’ minds — literally.

By tracking brain activity as people consider products, packaging and advertising concepts, scientists can now see the decision process in action. The jury is still out on whether neuroscience can make you buy things you might not otherwise buy, but I’ve used a couple of cognitive techniques in the vignette above to influence you to choose a particular fish tank, and to pay a particular price. Here are a few of them, drawn from cognitive scientist Dan Ariely’s book Predictibly Irrational.

» Arbitrary coherence. It describes the use of an “anchor” to suggest a value for something. Since price is arbitrary (what should a pearl cost? an acre in Santa Barbara? a shoeshine?), introducing any number into the conversation subtly influences the perception of value. Ariely asked a group of marketing research students at MIT to jot down the last two digits of their Social Security numbers. He then asked them to place a value on a group of products that included a bottle of wine, a Logitech trackball, a design book and box of chocolates. The group was then asked to bid silently on each product, and lo and behold, the holders of the highest Social Security numbers bid the most for the products. In the vignette above, I introduced the number 122 (the price I paid for the fish) as an “anchor” to the price of the fish tank.

» The decoy effect. A few years ago, Williams-Sonoma introduced a product that failed to take off: a $275 bread machine. A loaf of bread back then was less than a dollar, so people may have figured, why pay $275 for a machine to make it? Solution? The marketing experts brought in by the retailer had them introduce a new machine priced at nearly $400. Now, customers had a way to place a value on the lower-priced machine. Guess what? Shoppers decided it was worth the money. As Ariely tells the story, the lower-priced bread makers started flying off the shelves. In the vignette, I gave you a higher-priced but roughly equivalent tank to make the lower-priced tank with the same 3/8-inch glass seem like a bargain.

» Closing off options. In other experiments with MIT students, Ariely demonstrated a human propensity to expend irrationally large amounts of resources (money!) in an effort to avoid the closing off of options. There is a defect built into our perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that makes us go a little nutty when someone is closing the door on just about anything. (Think about the attractiveness of the unavailable man or woman in dating.) Of course, marketers have been exploiting this weakness since the first time someone said “today only” — the technique I used to draw you to the middle bowl in the fish tank store.

» Expert advice. Gregory Berns of Emory University recorded the brain activity of subjects receiving advice from a perceived “expert” as they were making financial decisions. The results should make you pause the next time you’re getting advice from someone trying to sell you something. Basically, Berns found, the brain shuts down much of its decision-making functionality after listening to expert advice. In the vignette, Frank establishes himself as a pro (in fish psychology, no less) with “19 years in the business.”

There are several other small manipulations in the vignette above, but in the interests of space, I’m going to skip to the final one — straight from the frontiers of research. When Frank leaned across the counter to confide about the water softener, he practiced a little neuroscientifically validated salesmanship. He spoke into my right ear. Brand-new research by Luca Tommasi and Daniele Marzoli from the University Gabriele d’Annunzio in Chieti, Italy, shows that requests made to that ear are more likely to be successful. Tommasi and Marzoli’s initial experiments, reported in Science Daily last month, were conducted by requesting cigarettes from strangers. Significantly more strangers gave up their cigarettes to the researchers when they spoke into the right ear.

Which brings me to the final — and obvious — question. Are we headed for a future where human behavior will be dictated by the subliminal messages and manipulations revealed by scanning people’s brains? Will the magicians of neuroscience make robots of us all? Psychological professionals and ethicists are seriously considering this question, so stay tuned for their answers.

In the meantime, for those of us who just want to spend our money wisely, watch out for the salesman who gives expert advice and speaks softly into your right ear.

— Russell Collins is a Santa Barbara psychotherapist and divorce mediator. Click here for more information.

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